HUGH MILLER 103 



'menaced our nobles with the horrors of the French 

 Revolution, when the guillotine plied its nightly 

 task, and the bloody hearts of aristocrats dangled in 

 buttonholes on the streets of Paris ! ' proof was 

 naturally wanting. A phantom of a ' grey discrowned 

 head sounding hollow on the scaffold at Whitehall ' was 

 also served up by that paper, in its devotion to the house 

 of Buccleuch, as a threat in which the irate scribe pro- 

 fessed to detect a subtle attack on the House of 

 Hanover in the interests of the Free Church. ' I am 

 a Whig, in politics,' he said, ' never a Radical or Con- 

 servative.' He had no cheap sympathy with the work- 

 ing men, for them he had seen on their worst side. 

 ' Three-fourths of the distress of the country's mechanics 

 (of course not reckoning that of the unhappy class who 

 have to compete with machinery) and nine-tenths of their 

 vagabondism will be found restricted to inferior workmen, 

 who like Hogarth's "Careless Apprentice," neglected 

 the opportunity of their second term of education. The 

 sagacious painter had a truer insight into this matter 

 than most of our modern educationists.' He was no 

 believer in household, much less in universal, suffrage, 

 and as an admirer of Delolme's views on our constitu- 

 tion, the radical he regarded as a 'political quack,' 

 convinced as he was that 'those who think must 

 govern those that toil.' But he advocated, along with 

 Guthrie, a system of undenominational education of a 

 kind pretty much what is now established, a moderate 

 extension of the franchise, abolition of entail, and the 





